High-speed printers are being used for more and more high-speed, high-volume printing applications. For example, high-speed ink jet printers are currently being used to print photographic prints in photograph processing laboratories. A single photographic print can require on the order of ten or more megabytes of image data. In photograph processing laboratories multiple photographs are typically printed simultaneously. Thus, the photographic processing application, and other applications, require printers capable of accepting, processing, and printing huge amounts of data. As the speed and scale of these applications increase, the image processor tends to be a bottleneck as it tries to keep up with the rest of the system.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved image processor architecture to rapidly process the vast amounts of data required in high-speed, high-volume printing applications such as photographic processing and the like.